Edited Volumes
Keydana, Götz, Wolfgang Hock & Paul Widmer (eds.) 2021, Comparison and Gradation in Indo-European (The Mouton Handbooks of Indo-European Typology, 1). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
The ability to compare is fundamental to human cognition. Expressing various types of comparison is thus essential to any language. The present volume presents detailed grammatical descriptions of how comparison and gradation are expressed in ancient Indo-European languages. The detailed chapters devoted to the individual languages go far beyond standard handbook knowledge. Each chapter is structured the same way to facilitate cross-reference and (typological) comparison. The data are presented in a top-down fashion and in a format easily accessible to the linguistic community. The topics covered are similatives, equatives, comparatives, superlatives, elatives, and excessives. Each type of comparison is illustrated with glossed examples of all its attested grammatical realizations. The book is an indispensable tool for typologists, historical linguists, and students of the syntax and morphosyntax of comparison.
Monographs
Adam, Nina 2024, Optimal clitic positioning in Czech and beyond. Clitic syntax, morphology, and prosody from a constraint-based perspective. PhD thesis, Göttingen.
This thesis treats the placement of clitics in Czech from a constraint-based perspective. After having established the set of unambiguous second-position clitics in the language, the placement patterns and their interaction with information-structurally induced movements are described. Based on this data, it is argued that Czech clitics cannot occupy a fixed syntactic position. Instead, conflicting constraints lead to varying output positions depending on the syntactic context. Since Czech clitics do not require a prosodic host, these constraints refer only to syntactic domains. The analysis is extended to further Slavic languages, including Serbo-Croatian. It is shown how the constraint-based approach can be applied to this language, where prosodic domains do play a role for clitic placement.
Articles
2024
Blaha Pfeiler, Barbara, Skopeteas, Stavros 2024. Numeral classifiers in Yucatec Maya: Microvariation and syntactic change. Journal of Historical Syntax8.6, 1-49. doi: 10.18148/hs/2024.v8i6.219
Numeral classifiers in Yucatec Maya are subject to two processes of language change that create variation in the contemporary language. The first process is the use of a general classifier instead of specific sortal classifiers. The second process is the use of the general classifier along with mensural classifiers. Our study examines the microvariation of the contemporary language in space and time, based on data from the Atlas of Yucatec Maya and draws inferences about the entity of change in diachronic perspective. Our findings show that these processes are partially interconnected, reflecting the emergence of a general marker of Cardinality (Krifka 1995, Bale & Coon 2014, Bale, Coon & Arcos 2019). The dispersion of these phenomena in geographical space shows that they only partially overlap, suggesting that the underlying processes may apply independently from each other. Furthermore, the use of the general classifier in expressions of measure does not apply equally to all mensural classifiers. Hence, a further source of variation comes from mensural classifiers: some of them lose their function as classifiers and are only used as measure nouns. Contemporary variation can thus be understood as the cumulative effect of these processes.
Chakmakjian, Samuel, Hossep Dolatian, Stavros Skopeteas 2024. Word Stress and Prosodic Events in Eastern Armenian Proc. Speech Prosody 2024, 1170-1174, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-236
In languages with word-final stress, it is always a challenge to distinguish whether prosodic events are associated with the word-final stress (pitch accents) or the right edge of the prosodic word (edge tones). The present study focuses on Eastern Armenian, where stress occurs within the last non-schwa syllable – excluding certain unstressed suffixes. To determine the associate of nuclear/prenuclear tonal events, we conducted a speech production experiment (scripted speech) with 10 native speakers of Eastern Armenian. Target words, varying in stress placement (final, penult), were recorded as objects in SOV sentences. Utterances with these targets were performed as answers to questions that had different types of focus: pre-nuclear (V-focus) and nuclear (O-focus). Our Autosegmental-Metrical analysis, complemented by aggregated F0 contours, reveals that (a) a high pitch target demarcates the pre-nuclear domain from the nucleus, aligning with the right edge of the target word; (b) a high pitch target associates with the stressed syllable of the nucleus. These findings allow us to establish a distinction between two types of H-targets in Eastern Armenian: edge tones delimiting pre-nuclear material (H-) and pitch accents (H*) at the intonational nucleus.
Höhn, Georg A word order typology of adnominal person Linguistic Typology
This paper investigates cross-linguistic variation in the expression of adnominal person (pers n; cf. English “we linguists”) based on a survey of 114 languages, focusing on word order. Two subtypes are distinguished according to whether pers n is expressed by an independent pronoun as in English or by a morphologically dependent marker. Prenominal adnominal pronouns are the most common type of pers n marking overall, while the morphologically dependent markers are predominantly postnominal (or phrase-final). The order of pers n marking relative to its accompanying noun is shown to interact with head-directionality (VO/OV-order, position of dependent genitives, adpositions) and with the position of demonstrative modifiers (prenominal/postnominal) using generalised linear mixed-effects models. Theoretical implications and possible explanations for deviations are discussed concerning variation in the encoding of pers n as head or phrasal modifier and its (lack of) co-categoriality with demonstratives.
Höhn, Georg to appear, Preposition allomorphy in Calabrian Greek (Greko) and Standard Modern Greek and its theoretical implications. Languages (special issue on Greek morphosyntax).
The article argues that the alternation between the prepositions asce ‘from’ and an ‘from’ in the south Italian Greek variety Greko and a similar alternation between the preposition se ‘in, to, into’ and the allomorph s- found in both Greko and Standard Modern Greek represent instances of contextually conditioned allomorphy sensitive to a linearly adjacent definite article. Alternative approaches in terms of portmanteaux or making use of hyper-contextual rules for Vocabulary Insertion are shown to be unable to account for the data, supporting the need for allowing reference to linear adjacency relations in morphosyntactic theories of allomorphy.
Polyanskaya, Leona, Skopeteas, Stavros, Halama, Peter, Hollenbach, Robin, & Ordin, Michael . 2024. Derivational morphology and suffixing bias on linguistic and nonlinguistic material Journal of Language Evolution , doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzae005
Across world languages, grammatical meanings tend to be expressed by suffixes. Whether this bias is defined by shaping language so that it is easily processed by domain-general cognitive mechanisms or whether the bias is specific to the language domain has not been resolved. Most evidence supporting these competing hypotheses focuses on the effect of suffixing bias on inflectional morphology and ignores derivational morphology. Here, we explored suffixing bias in German and Slovak populations. These languages are strongly suffixing in terms of inflectional morphology but differ in verbal derivational morphology. Verbal prefixes can be detached from the root in the German language and are always attached to the root in the Slovak language. We explored whether suffixing bias can be observed in both populations while detecting and memorizing linguistic and nonlinguistic sequences in a continuous sensory input by means of statistical learning mechanisms. We found that suffixes facilitate statistical learning more than prefixes on linguistic material, and the effect was not observed on nonlinguistic material, suggesting that suffixing bias is specific to speech. When people are forced to choose between suffixed and prefixed sequences from the familiarization stream, German speakers show a stronger preference for suffixed sequences, while Slovak speakers do not show any preference; hence, properties of derivational morphology of the ambient language can modulate suffixing bias.
Skopeteas, Stavros, Firmin Ahoua, Marie Laure Koffi Adou, and Beatrice Koffi Mambo. 2024 Resuming topics and foci: Anyi, Baule and microvariation in Kwa languages Journal of African languages and linguistics 45(1), 45-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2024-2004
Left peripheral topics and foci often differ with respect to resumption: in languages such as Italian, Tzotzil Maya, and Warlpiri, while fronted topics may be co-indexed with a pronominal form in the corresponding argument position, fronted foci correspond to a gap. However, this contrast does not universally apply. In languages such as Anyi and Baule, two Kwa languages of Côte d’Ivoire, subjects and animate objects must be resumed by a pronoun whenever they appear in the left periphery – independent of information structure. The question is whether this instance of cross-linguistic variation arises through differences in the syntax of left peripheral positions in various languages or in the conditions of resumption. The present study examines data from Kwa languages and concludes that the difference lies in the conditions of resumption, which are orthogonal to the syntactic differences between topics and foci. Resumptives have a dual nature in these languages, serving as anaphoric constants (true resumptives) in topicalization and as bound variables (apparent resumptives) in focus constructions. A survey of the relevant facts in further Kwa languages reveals that resumption is determined by factors that are independent from information structure and relate to the recoverability of empty argument positions.
Skopeteas, Stavros 2024. Prosodic properties of the post- predicate domain. In Haig, Geoffrey, Rasekh-Mahand, Mohammad, Stilo, Donald, Schreiber, Laurentia & Schiborr, Nils (eds.). Post-predicate elements in the Western Asian Transition Zone: A corpus-based approach to areal typology. Berlin: Language Science Press.
This article examines the prosodic properties of the material following the predicate in OV languages of the Western Asian Transition Zone and discusses two major phenomena. First, the examined languages differ regarding the focus options of the post-predicate domain: while a narrow focus cannot be expressed in this domain in Standard Turkish, the focus…
2023
Canché Teh, B. Flor, Barbara Blaha Degler, Stavros Skopeteas. 2023. La variación del maya yucateco en la percepción de hablantes nativos Estudios De Cultura Maya, 62, 297-326.
En este artículo se explora el efecto de proximidad en la identificación de los espacios geográficos en donde se habla diferente desde la percepción de los hablantes nativos de la lengua maya de la península de Yucatán. Los rasgos más salientes que los hablantes identifican entre una variedad y otra se encuentran en la entonación, la velocidad de la elocución, así como en el léxico. Los datos obtenidos son de un total de 73 personas entrevistadas en la península de Yucatán, hombres y mujeres monolingües en maya y bilingües maya-español, cuyo rango de edad varió entre los 22 y los 81 años. El análisis de los datos y un estudio de caso que se realizó entre dos comunidades cercanas mostró que la proximidad se vincula más con las diferencias de habla que con las similitudes. Se identificó que la prosodia y las variantes léxicas se perciben como diferentes, sobre todo entre hablantes de lugares cercanos entre sí. Las respuestas indicaron que la proximidad no solamente está determinada por la lejanía o cercanía geográfica entre comunidades, sino también por la prominencia cultural que tienen algunos lugares, tal es el caso del estado de Yucatán, al interior del cual, además, destacan las ciudades de Valladolid y Peto.
Keydana, Götz 2023, Language change and the actuation problem: grammaticalization in Vedic Sanskrit.Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 10/1, 1-17. doi: 10.1515/jsall-2023-1007.
One of the structures denoting the future in Sanskrit is the so-called -tā́-future, based on an agent noun and a present tense copula. Typologically, this grammaticalization path is unique. In this paper, this astonishing fact is tied to another unique feature of hysterotone -tŕ̥-nouns, their situative semantics, which forces a presupposition relating the event depicted by the noun to another event taken from the context. In ambiguous contexts, this relation could be (re-)interpreted by hearers as one between the event and the speech act itself. The grammaticalization, then, is hearer-based and triggered by semantic reanalysis. The process is essentially identical to phonemicization. The scenario developed in this paper thus further strengthens the position that grammaticalization is ontologically not distinct from other types of language change based on speaker–hearer interaction.
Keydana, Götz 2023, Constituent structure in non-informant languages: Evidence from inscriptions. In Theresa Roth, Emmanuel Dupraz & Valentina Belfiore (eds.): Schriftkonventionen in pragmatischer Perspektive. Akten der Arbeitstagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft (Brüssel, 13.—14. September 2018). Leuven: Peeters, 268—294.
Non-standard writing offers a unique window into the knowledge of speakers about language structure. This is especially welcome with respect to ancient languages. In this paper I illustrate the relevance of writing by looking at punctuation in the Tabulae Iguvinae and in Attic dedicatory inscriptions. I show that punctuation reflects prosodic and, to a lesser degree, syntactic structure, thus allowing for insights otherwise unobtainable without recourse to judgements of native speakers.
Keydana, Götz 2021 [2023], Accent or intonation? The vocative in Vedic. With an excursus to Greek. Historische Sprachforschung 134, 196-213.
From the point of view of accentology the Vedic vocative is remarkable for two reasons: In clause-initial position, its first syllable bears an udātta irrespec- tive of word accent. In all other positions, the vocative has anudātta throughout. These striking tonal patterns, however, do not reflect word accent. Rather, they are a means to render intonational patterns like the vocative chant with an initial high boundary tone and a low tone in parentheticals respectively. Similarly, the seeming deaccentuation in finite main clause verbs is a way of marking the low tone associated with the right boundary of assertive utterances. Regarding word level accent, vocatives do not differ from nominatives. The calling contour proposed for Vedic clause-initial vocatives is also attested in Greek, which, however, underwent a change in historic times leading to the introduction of a vocative particle as a host for the chant-initial high tone.
Yu, Yidong 2023, Optionality, variation and categorial properties: The case of plural marking in Yucatec Maya. In Kopf, Kristin & Thilo Weber (eds.), Free variation in grammar: empirical and theoretical approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 284-314.
In this paper, I propose a semantic account of the optionality of plural marking in Yucatec Maya (Mayan; Mexico) which pins the variation in plural marking on the variation in noun denotations (Chierchia 1998; Borer 2005; Deal 2017; Moroney 2021). I argue that this optionality is not a free variation. I further argue that the noun denotations vary between apportionable and generic, which is manifested in the option of a pseudopartitive operation (Selkirk 1977; Higginbotham 1994) available at the final stage of the interpretation of the nouns in the semantics. The fact that, by this account, the computation of Yucatec constructions that involve counting yields correct results provides further supporting evidence for the proposed analysis.
2022
Blaha Pfeiler, Barbara & Stavros Skopeteas 2022, Sources of convergence in indigenous languages: Lexical variation in Yucatec Maya. PLOS ONE 17(5): e0268448. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268448.
Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: ...Keydana, Götz 2022, Back to the root — and away again! In Fellner, Hans, Melanie Malzahn & Theresa-Susann Illés (eds.): Zurück zur Wurzel: Struktur, Funktion und Semantik der Wurzel im Indogermanischen. Akten der 15. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft vom 13. bis 16. September 2016 in Wien. Wiesbaden: Reichert. 131-146.
The root is a concept developed by the ancient Indian grammarians; it is strikingly absent from the ancient western tradition. Following the reception of the Indian grammatical tradition in the late 18th century this concept had a formative influence on morphological thinking in Indo- European linguistics and beyond. This paper, which draws on data from Vedic Sanskrit and, to a lesser degree, PIE, is an attempt at rehabilitating the western word-based approach to morphology. In the first part I deconstruct the notion of the root as a phonological domain. I reject the notion of root constraints and demonstrate that phonological processes never target roots. In the second part I show that word-based morphology is far superior in describing morphological competence than constructive root-based models. I conclude that the root is hardly a realistic linguistic concept. Rather, it tends to obfuscate important generalizations and may eventually lead to undue premises (mis-)guiding our understanding of the early attested languages and of PIE.
Polyanskaya, Leona 2022, Cognitive mechanisms of statistical learning and segmentation of continuous sensory input. Memory and Cognition 50, 979–996.
Two classes of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain segmentation of continuous sensory input into discrete recurrent constituents: clustering and boundary-finding mechanisms. Clustering mechanisms are based on identifying fre- quently co-occurring elements and merging them together as parts that form a single constituent. Bracketing (or boundary- finding) mechanisms work by identifying rarely co-occurring elements that correspond to the boundaries between discrete constituents. In a series of behavioral experiments, I tested...
Polyanskaya, Leona, Héctor M. Manrique, Arthur G. Samuel, Antonio Marín, Azucena García-Palacios & Mikhail Ordin 2022, Intermodality differences in statistical learning: Phylogenetic and ontogenetic influences. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1511(1), 191-209.
In Basque–Spanish bilinguals, statistical learning (SL) in the visual modality was more efficient on nonlinguistic than linguistic input; in the auditory modality, we found the reverse pattern of results. We hypothesize that SL was shaped for processing nonlinguistic environmental stimuli and only later, as the language faculty emerged, recycled for speech processing. This led to further adaptive changes in the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying speech processing, including SL. By contrast...
2021
Bril, Isabelle & Stavros Skopeteas 2021, The syntax and prosody of focus in Northern Amis (Formosan). Faits de Langues, 52.1: 61-87. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-05201004
This article outlines the strategies for expressing focus in Northern Amis (Formosan). Three types of focus constructions are examined: cleft constructions, focus markers and emphatic lengthening. Focus by clefting is subject to the well-known nominative-only constraint on extraction and relativization found in Formosan and Philippine type languages, such that a clefted constituent must be the syntactic pivot of the verb in the relative clause containing the presupposition, and its semantic role is co-indexed by the appropriate voice marker on the verb...
Greif, Markus & Stavros Skopeteas 2021, Correction by Focus: Cleft Constructions and the Cross-Linguistic Variation in Phonological Form. Frontiers in Psychology, 12: 648478. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648478.
A challenging issue of cross-linguistic variation is that the same syntactic construction may appear in different arrays of contexts depending on language. For instance, cleft constructions appear with contrastive focus in English, but in a larger array of contexts in French. A part of the cross-linguistic variation may be due to prosodic differences, since prosodic possibilities determine the array of focus structures that can be mapped onto one and the same syntactic configuration. In the present study, we compare languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German), with languages that do not use this prosodic strategy (French, Mandarin Chinese)...
Müller, Gabor, Emese Bodnár, Stavros Skopeteas & Julia Marina Kröger 2021, On the Impact of Case and Prosody on Thematic Role Disambiguation: An Eye-Tracking Study on Hungarian. Language and Speech, 64(4): 930-961. doi: 10.1177/0023830920974709.
Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses...
Höhn, Georg 2021, Towards a consistent annotation of nominal person in Universal Dependencies. Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2021). Sofia: Association for Computational Linguistics. 75–83.
On the basis of four small scale studies on corpora of English, German and Modern Greek, this paper points out problems with the lack of annotation guidelines for adnominal pronoun constructions like "we linguists" in treebanks employing the Universal Dependencies framework. I propose that a more uniform strategy of annotating these constructions will improve the internal consistency of corpora and better facilitate crosslinguistic comparability. Specifically, I argue against the use of the APPOS(ition) relation for these constructions and in favour of employing the DET(erminer) relation as a default annotation strategy.
Ordin, Mikhail, Leona Polyanskaya & Arthur G. Samuel 2021, An evolutionary account for inter-modality differences in statistical learning. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1486(1), 76-89.
The cognitive mechanisms underlying statistical learning are engaged for the purposes of speech processing and language acquisition. However, these mechanisms are shared by a wide variety of species that do not possess the language faculty. Moreover, statistical learning operates across domains, including nonlinguistic material. Ancient mechanisms for segmenting continuous sensory input into discrete constituents have evolved for general-purpose segmentation of the environment and been readopted for processing linguistic input. Linguistic input provides...
Ordin, Mikhail & Leona Polyanskaya 2021, The role of metacognition in recognition of the content of statistical learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 28(1), 333-340.
Despite theoretical debate on the extent to which statistical learning is incidental or modulated by explicit instructions and conscious awareness of the content of statistical learning, no study has ever looked into the metacognition of statistical learning. We used an artificial language learning paradigm and a segmentation task that required splitting a continuous stream of syllables into discrete recurrent constituents. During this task...
2020
Höhn, Georg 2020, The third person gap in adnominal pronoun constructions. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 69.
The lack of third person adnominal pronouns in English-type languages (*they linguists) is argued to be an effect of contextually conditioned allomorphy between the exponents of the definite article and third person pronouns within a pronominal determiner structure. A crosslinguistic survey of 82 languages finds that the third person gap is crosslinguistically relatively rare and may be restricted to Europe and surrounding areas. The survey also suggests a potential interaction between the third person gap and the availability of distinct articles, as expected on the proposed analysis. The paper also discusses issues raised by the third person gap for alternative analyses, including those advocating an NP-analysis.
Keydana, Götz 2020, Accentual mobility in Vedic. In Repanšek, Luka, Harald Bichlmeier & Velizar Sadovski, vácām̐si miśrā́ kr̥ṇavāmahai: Proceedings of international conference of the Society for Indo-European Studies and IWoBA XII, Ljubljana 4-7 June 2019. Baar: Hamburg. 355-366.
It is a well-established fact about PIE that the language had mobile accentual paradigms in the nominal domain. However, even in Vedic, one of the key witnesses for the reconstructed system, accentual mobility is strikingly restricted. It is the aim of this paper to assess mobility in Vedic from a diachronic point of view and to establish its bearing on reconstruction. In the first part of the paper, we look into root nouns. The second part is devoted to the rare instances of mobility in primary derivatives. It is shown that phonological factors and paradigmatic pressure are the fundamental driving forces behind the Vedic system. As a consequence, the paper calls into question the adequacy of a model based on compositional accent (in the sense of Kiparsky 2010) for Early Vedic.
Ordin, Mikhail, Leona Polyanskaya & David Soto 2020, Neural bases of learning and recognition of statistical regularities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1467, 60-76.
Statistical learning is a set of cognitive mechanisms allowing for extracting regularities from the environment and segmenting continuous sensory input into discrete units. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (N = 25) in conjunction with an artificial language learning paradigm to provide new insight into the neural mechanisms of statistical learning, considering both the online process of extracting statistical regularities and the subsequent offline recognition of learned patterns. Notably, prior fMRI studies on statistical learning have not contrasted neural activation during the learning and recognition experimental phases. Here, we found that...
Ordin, Mikhail, Leona Polyanskaya, David Soto & Nicola Molinaro 2020, Electrophysiology of statistical learning: exploring online learning process and offline learning product. European Journal of Neuroscience 51(9), 2008-2022.
A continuous stream of syllables is segmented into discrete constituents based on the transitional probabilities (TPs) between adjacent syllables by means of statistical learning. However, we still do not know whether people attend to high TPs between frequently co-occurring syllables and cluster them together as parts of the discrete constituents or attend to low TPs aligned with the edges between the constituents and extract them as whole units. Earlier studies on TP-based segmentation also have not distinguished between the segmentation process (how people segment continuous speech) and the learning product (what is learnt by means of statistical learning mechanisms). In the current study...
Ordin, Mikhail, Leona Polyanskaya & David Soto 2020, Metacognitive processing in language learning tasks is affected by bilingualism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 46(3), 529-538.
We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition test followed by confidence judgments. We used a signal detection approach to estimate type 1 performance...
Polyanskaya, Leona, Maria Grazia Busà & Mikhail Ordin 2020, Capturing cross-linguistic differences in macro-rhythm: The case of Italian and English. Language and Speech 63(2), 242-263.
We tested the hypothesis that languages can be classified by their degree of tonal rhythm (Jun, 2014). The tonal rhythms of English and Italian were quantified using the following parameters: (a) regularity of tonal alternations in time, measured as durational variability in peak-to-peak and valley-to-valley intervals; (b) magnitude of F0 excursions, measured as the range of frequencies covered by the speaker between consecutive F0 maxima and minima; (c) number of tonal target points per intonational unit; and (d) similarity of F0 rising and falling contours within intonational units. The results show...
Skopeteas, Stavros, Elisabeth Verhoeven & Gisbert Fanselow 2020, Discontinuous noun phrases in Yucatec Maya. Journal of Linguistics, First View: 1-40. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000419.
Languages differ in whether or not they allow discontinuous noun phrases. If they do, they further vary in the ways the nominal projections interact with the available syntactic operations. Yucatec Maya has two left-peripheral configurations that differ syntactically: a preverbal position for foci or wh-elements that is filled in by movement, and the possibility to adjoin topics at the highest clausal layer. These two structural options are reflected in different ways of the formation of discontinuous patterns...
2019
Adam, Nina 2019, Clitics at the interfaces of grammar: Defining the "first position" in Czech. Proceedings of "Typology of morphosyntactic parameters", vol. 2, iss. 1, Moscow.
This paper is concerned with the nature of the "first position" in Czech, i.e. the position preceding second-position clitics. Although the first position is determined by syntactic constituency, independent of clitic requirements, clitic placement itself cannot be captured purely in the syntax. Even approaches which assume an influence of PF face serious problems. Instead I propose an OT analysis, showing how the first position results from clitic-specific constraints referring to syntactic constituents, as well as from independent syntactic constraints. The prosodically-determined clitic placement in BCMS can be explained using exactly the same constraint types, only referring to different constituents.